Dr. John Feo and Dr. Antonino Tumeo, of PNNL's Computational Sciences and Mathematics Division Data Intensive Scientific and High Performance Computing groups, respectively, will serve as guest editors for a special issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing devoted to "Architectures and Algorithms for Irregular Applications."

Antonino Tumeo (left) and John Feo (right).

The issue will focus on the novel approaches for data-intensive, irregular applications, an emerging application for knowledge discovery in diverse fields, including cyber security, bioinformatics, computer-aided design, machine learning, and semantic analysis of complex networks, where there is a distinct need to process large volumes of irregular, unstructured data. Currently, high-performance architectures rely on data locality, regular computations, structured data, and assume data sets that are easy to partition. Consequently, they are inefficient for supporting irregular applications.

The "Architectures and Algorithms for Irregular Applications" special issue will explore new solutions for efficient design, development, and execution of irregular applications squarely aimed at addressing these requirements throughout the hardware and software stack in current and future computing system architectures. These solutions will be crucial for solving scientific challenges in the coming decades, especially as computing systems generate increasingly more massive quantities of heterogeneous data that must be processed, analyzed, and managed.

For this special issue, the editors also have extended a call for papers. They welcome submissions related to irregular applications in the form of new features for micro- and system-architectures, runtime systems, compilers, languages, libraries, and algorithms. Their topics of interest include: network and memory architectures; many-core, hybrid, heterogeneous, and custom architectures (Tilera, graphics processing units, field-programmable gate arrays); modeling, evaluation, and characterization of architectures for memory-intensive and irregular applications; combinatorial (graph) algorithms and their applications; parallelization techniques and data structures; and case studies of irregular applications—to name only a few.

Paper submissions will be accepted through Monday, March 24, 2014. All manuscripts should be submitted through the Elsevier Editorial System. During the submission process, select "Special Issue: AAIA" at the "Article Type" prompt.